Etched bets $120M on an ASIC built purely for Transformers
AI startup Etched just raised $120M to build Sohu, a specialized ASIC hardwired solely for Transformer models. By stripping away general-purpose GPU flexibility, the company claims it outperforms Nvidia's H100 by 20x. Why it matters: It could drastically lower LLM serving costs, but the chip hasn't taped out yet and is useless for any other AI architecture.